I really did not want to stop writing for The Jewish Chronicle. It has nothing to do with the money (the rate was cut in half a decade ago during one of the paper’s periodic financial crises), and everything to do with the readership. Forgive the generalisation but Jews are fun to write for – you get a lot of feedback. Some of it occasionally positive.
And I’d been doing it for 20 years. The editor who first invited me to write for him, Ned Temko, contacted me after seeing this piece in the Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/g2/story/0,3604,963876,00.html
I was surprised. At the time I couldn’t even name most of the Jewish holidays let alone celebrate them. I didn’t then and can’t now claim to speak for the Jewish community. But I have a certain kind of Jewish experience: I had a father brought up in the Jewish East End who was a runner at the battle of Cable Street. I had a grandmother who spoke nothing but Yiddish and – of course – I have the name. Also I have eyes and ears.
I’ve had a lot of fun at the JC. One of my early columns was a mickey-take on the Top 10 most influential Jews awards that some well-meaning community member had established - so I imagined the bottom ten least influential Jews. Possibly my most controversial column was one questioning circumcision. Frankly I took a few liberties.
But there was a lot of serious stuff too. Wikipedia records that:
In December 2019, The Jewish Chronicle published an article by Melanie Phillips which asserted that Islamophobia was a bogus term which provided cover for antisemites. The Board of Deputies of British Jews described its publication as an error, and editor Stephen Pollard acknowledged that "A number of people within the Jewish community, and friends of the community, have expressed their dismay – and anger – at its content”.
But in March that year, following the Christchurch New Zealand massacre of 50 Muslim worshippers in New Zealand, I had written for the JC on the pernicious nature of anti-Muslim prejudice. Here’s that piece:
As the piece reflects, this debate hadn’t just started. Six years earlier the distinctly non-Jewish author Douglas Murray - then at the half-way point in his dismal journey to the far-right - was published in the JC also disputing the existence of Islamophobia. Within a fortnight the paper published this response from me:
https://www.thejc.com/lets-talk/an-unhelpful-approach-erg9kvk6
In some ways this established a pattern, not just for me but also for more liberal or centrist columnists like Jonathan Freedland. When it seemed necessary we would provide what we took to be the nuance when some others would rage. And it felt like a valuable thing to do. Readers told me they agreed.
Meanwhile, like many other low circulation and specialist publications in the internet era the JC had hit very hard times. Circulation halved (we might note that the community itself is smaller than it was) and our fees with them. Though I didn’t realise it things were becoming desperate. At one point we stopped being paid and it took some time to realise that this wasn’t a book-keeping glitch.
Then the JC went bust altogether. I wish I could say that I been paying greater attention but I’ve never been that interested in the finances and ownership structure of the companies that have employed me. So when it was announced that a consortium had rescued the title and appointed a new editor, with the old one – Stephen Pollard – acting as comment editor, I didn’t so much as Google the process. I was just glad.
In 2021 a new editor (who I had never heard of) came in and promptly did what no editor had done for nearly a decade – invited me to lunch. Jake Wallis Simons was charming, friendly and though his history on the Mail and as a novelist didn’t immediately recommend him as the boss of the paper, then I had to reflect on what a mess he had been asked to preside over.
We rubbed along. I was never censored. Then came the Hamas attack on October 7th which completely traumatised the Jewish community here in Britain. Feeling under assault the community, it seemed to me, withdrew further and further into its shell. And one aspect of its withdrawal was a deep feeling of being once again the subject of widespread criticism and prejudice. In circumstances like that it is all too easy to give up the habit of critical thinking and to see almost everybody as your enemy: all demonstrators, the BBC, you name it. Likewise it became all too easy to see your enemy’s most vocal enemy as your friend.
The tone of the JC in the post October 7th weeks was exemplified by an appalling column commissioned from Douglas Murray – fresh from his writing for the Spectator that “maybe (the Israelis) will finally put an end to this insoluble nightmare, raze Hamas to the ground, or clear all the Palestinians from that benighted strip.”
Murray’s column took aim at commentators like Hugo Rifkind and Josh Glancy (who are Jewish) whose attitude he caricatured as “when Jews are slaughtered the best thing to do is just sit it out, be quiet, and wait for the next one. Because it wouldn’t do to have too strong a response now, would it?”
In the same piece Murray suggested that the Hamas crimes were worse than those of the SS because:
Average members of the SS and other killing units of Hitler’s were rarely proud of their average days’ work. Very few felt that shooting Jews in the back of the head all day and kicking their bodies into pits was where their own lives had meant to end up. Many spent their evenings getting blind drunk to try to forget. Nazi commanders had to worry about staff “morale”. When the war ended, the Nazis tried to pretend that Treblinka and other death camps never existed.
It was an unforgivable bit of historical revisionism – as the many pictures of happy Auschwitz guards enjoying their leisure time and others of smiling onlookers at mass executions can attest.
But it was to an end. Which was to argue that literally anything Israel might do in response was justified, that anyone demonstrating against it should be arrested and that anyone arguing differently was some kind of fool or traitor. It was polarising with a purpose, which was to paint Britain’s Muslim minority as an unassimilable enemy within tolerated by a liberal elite, as Murray’s books had warned.
I sent an email of dismay to Stephen Pollard which wasn’t answered. And from there things went downhill. Jake took to writing columns for the Telegraph and Spectator and just before Christmas penned one arguing that advocating for an eventual two-state solution – an objective agreed to by everyone except Hamas and the Israeli far-right (now represented in government) was a “luxury belief” – itself a term used by the New Right and recently popularised in Britain by Suella Braverman.
Once again I replied to this in my JC column a couple of weeks later – something which took a little negotiation but which Simons agreed to. It’s here (though for some reason the link is refusing to be clickable):
https://www.thejc.com/lets-talk/the-two-state-solution-is-the-only-solution-not-a-luxury-belief-kekx8ewk
A few weeks after that Simons was to be found on Twitter endorsing yet another climate denialist film by the ex-RCP and debunked pro-warming warrior, Martin Durkin. I despaired. I thought he was severely damaging the reputation of the paper, but free speech for me and free speech for him, right? Though by now I was beginning to wonder if I had been mutating from “valuable part of a wide expression of views” to “convenient beard to protect the paper from the charge of becoming a right-wing rag”.
Then several of my colleagues on the JC set up a WhatsApp group and one of its main concerns was the question of the paper’s ownership. We didn’t know who we were working for and given what was happening, we felt we should. So we sent a collective letter (something I don’t like doing) to Simons asking for clarity. A short time later he announced the setting up of a named board of trustees, but still without identifying the people who, in essence, had appointed him. We decided to give this a little time and see what happened.
And what happened was Elon Perry. Those who have read Voodoo Histories may recall the career of the fraudster and fabulist Ari Ben Menashe who provided the best-selling author Gordon Thomas with material for several books all of which used Menashe as an inside source on how Mossad was involved in every world event, from the drowning of Robert Maxwell to the death of Diana. For six weeks Perry – who no one had ever heard of – broke a series of front-page exclusives supposedly involving captured Hamas information, most of which managed to justify a current twist in Bibi Netanyahu’s Gaza policy. Eventually journalists in Israel managed to establish that the security services believed these stories to be fake and that Perry himself was a fraud. It was a monstrous failure of editorial standards.
And so I’ve left the JC along with Jonny Freedland, Hadley Freeman and David Baddiel. I have no idea if anyone will even notice. As things stand and ironically I’m appearing at a JC event on media bias this week*, one aspect of which will see me attempt to show to the attendees why a new “report” on BBC bias compiled in Israel is an elaborate load of tendentious nonsense.
So now you know – whether you wanted to or not.
*The event was cancelled yesterday evening because some of the other panellists had suddenly withdrawn.
Great piece, David
Please write something about the report on the BBC written in Israel. Thank you